Monday, November 27, 2017

Just like in my other forty-six posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.

Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer

I have long known that Godard was a big fan of Rouch but this is the first of his films I have seen. It is extraordinary. It breaks the fourth wall in more sophisticated and interesting ways than Godard ever did and serves as the template for the docu-style Godard would take into Masculin Feminin and several of his other films from the period. A number of the scenes are magical including the long take of Marceline walking as the camera moves farther and farther away from her and the moment when the father imparts mountain climbing lessons to his more risk-averse daughter.

Paul Fejos' Lonesome

I wish Paul Schrader were here. I've heard him list off on a number of occasions the things that cinema does particularly well and I always thought his list quite astute. But one thing he may or may not have mentioned that I think the medium does unusually well is restraint. When the cinema holds back from giving the audience what it craves for an extended amount of time and then finally delivers, the result can be incredibly powerful and moving. I'm thinking of Fellini's restraint from using a close-up until the very end of Nights of Cabiriaor Marker's sudden burst of movement in La Jetee or the emotional restraint Bresson exhibits throughout the entirety of Pickpocketuntil its very final moments. Here, the restraint has to do with sound and as with the very best examples of restraint, when it finally breaks or gives in, it comes as a complete shock. The first time the two characters spoke in LonesomeI did not know what to think. I have seen a good number of films but I have never gone into a silent film expecting to hear two characters speaking to one another 30 minutes in. But Fejos does not stop there. He dazzles with color, he dazzles with montage and then when it is time for him to bring it all to a close, he does that gloriously as well.

Agnes Varda's The Beaches of Agnes

Although I still do not know Varda's cinema well at all (to date, I have only seen this and Cleo), I am very interested in tracking down more of her work. Her cinema feels like some gourmet confection - inventive, sophisticated, quirky and most impressively, light. I have seen a few other filmmakers go down this path of personal essay or stream of conscious autobiography (Marker and Godard, particularly). But neither is able to articulate their personality and give you a feel for who they might be as a person better than Varda does here.

Billy Wilder's Avanti!

It is the work of a great artist, later in career, working at a time when a youth style has taken over that is so different and foreign it threatens to immediately render the director archaic or a fake depending on the approach he chooses. Aside from his nod to 8 1/2(and perhaps to all of the new generation's emphasis on style) in the film's prelude, Wilder confidently and intelligently chooses to stay "classic" and the film derives its power by this bold stance. It is like Dreyer post Nouvelle Vague giving us the UFO that is Gertrudor Bresson adding color but perhaps nothing else that is stylistically new to his oeuvre in 1983. Of course, also giving Avanti!its charge is the effect of classic elements in the hands of a master - deeply felt acting (I can't remember ever liking Lemmon better), an intricately designed narrative and long scenes, built and captured slowly, eloquently and artfully.

Monday, November 6, 2017

Just like in my other forty-five posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.

Abbas Kiarostami's The Traveler

In its one track pursuit and its tunnel focus on the young main character, it feels like a black and white predecessor to Where is the Friend's Home?. It is quintessential Kiarostami in its lyricism, its softness, its feel for the land and its rhythms. A couple of scenes, like the photography session in the schoolyard, rank as Kiarostami at his most inventive and most cinematic. Kiarostami would later become a little more rigorous with his filmmaking, longer takes, less music, but already in this, his first film over an hour, he announces himself as a great, new humanistic force.

Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn

Herzog is in the Hollywood system as much as I have ever seen but comes through, for the most part, true to form. Herzog finds in Bale another perfect embodiment for his distorted heroism and proves once again that he can bring out the jungle of the jungle better than anyone who has ever worked in the medium. The movie falters towards the end when it seems Herzog is trying to grasp at some sort of Hollywood convention but otherwise the film finds a unique, compelling voice inside a well-worn genre.

Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum

Having read that one of my favorite critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum, rated it in his best 100 films of all time, I was extremely curious to see it. It is exactly the type of film Rosenbaum tends to champion. It is not stylistically flashy nor even terribly entertaining; however, it tackles complex subject matter and it does so with an intelligence and narrative skill of a very high order. I may not always agree with Rosenbaum, but it is hard for me to argue with this film deserving attention and great respect.

Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine

I watched a version on YouTube without subtitles so was unable to catch every word. But, the film feels like the male version of Jules et Jim, or in other words, one male and two females. I don't know Rozier's cinema yet but if this film is any indication he has the New Wave's keen interest and eye for youth, female beauty and the sea.